The LA Times’ columnist Bill Dwyre dredges up a waterhsed moment in baseball: the undoing of Al Campanis before a national audience.
Campanis, Dodgers’ vice president and director of player personnel at the time, was a guest on the program along with Roger Kahn, author of the Classic The Boys of Summer. to mark the 40th anniversary of Robinson’s debut season.
Campanis unraveled while discussing the possibility of African-Americans as major league managers and made a poor choice of words when he said that they didn’t have the “necessities” to do the job. It was generally accepted that he meant to say they didn’t have the experience, which was one of those catch-22 situations: no experience without the job, no job without experience. But Campanis was out of his element and didn’t realize the political incorrectness of his response.
Things got off to a bad start when Campanis rambled for several minutes without answering the specific question put to him by host Ted Koppel about how long it took for the white players to accept him as a teammate, taking the opportunity to praise the difficulties his old friend faced when he first came up.
Judge for yourself:
Koppel was initially outraged, but seemed to drop the storyline when they came back from a commercial. Could it have been that he was ordered to drop it by his producers?
is available on Amazon.com,
Comments on this entry are closed.